Kenny Anderson Says He Was Sexually Abused as a Child

NBA great Kenny Anderson is taking part in an off-Broadway play, and revealed to the stunned audience that he was molested twice while growing up. Per SB Nation: “He’s doing this in the Penis Monologues, a sort of stage play/therapy session/storytelling contest organized by Anderson’s longtime friend Joe Brown, Jr. He’s doing it in an autobiography called Instructions Not Included, which is due out in March of next year. If Brown can figure out a way to get this television show made, Anderson will tell it there. […] Kenny Anderson will say it: he was sexually abused, in two separate instances and by two separate monsters, during a multiply harrowing early life that he will also tell you about. That life — ungoverned by a mother too addicted and conflicted to be much of a parent, then ungovernable by dint of the heavy freedom his talent for the game gave to him — did not prepare him for any kind of life but the one he’d suffered through. It bruised and broke him, as of course it would. It helped make him a person he no longer likes much, or much resembles. He wants to talk about it now, all of it. When Anderson sat down to talk about all this, he had just finished a cruise with his wife, which they’d taken in part to prepare for what is happening now, and will happen next. This is not the sort of thing that gets said just once, and Anderson — whose career was not what it could have been, by his own weary admission, but which was still what it was — will now have to talk about it and talk about it and talk about it, after decades of not. […] After he had talked about it all, after he’d waded into and through it, Anderson sat back on the couch and talked about the thing that got him out of Queens, that took him everywhere. ‘Me and my basketball, in the park’ he said. ‘I’d just go to the park. Whoever was in the park was who I was talking to, but I’ve always been sort of a loner.’ This was the basketball he played before anyone was watching, the same game and different. There are a lot of parks in New York City, a lot of places to show out and be the Kenny Anderson that basketball let him be. So Anderson would go there. ‘Me and my mentor, Vincent Smith, we’d work out and do drills and all that, and then just go to every borough,’ Anderson remembered. He was smiling, finally. ‘Find the best competition. And just kill ’em.'”